by Thom Jones
The characters and events in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.
Compilation copyright © 2018 by Sally L. Jones
Introduction © 2018 by Amy Bloom
Cover design by Gregg Kulick
Cover photograph Popperfoto / Getty Images
Author photograph by Rex Rystedt / Getty Images
Cover © 2018 Hachette Book Group, Inc.
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First Edition: October 2018
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ISBN 978-0-316-44935-9
E3-20180924-DA-PC
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Introduction: The Truth of Thom Jones
Selected Stories The Pugilist at Rest
The Black Lights
I Want to Live!
Silhouettes
Mosquitoes
A White Horse
Cold Snap
Superman, My Son
Way Down Deep in the Jungle
Pickpocket
Pot Shack
I Need a Man to Love Me
Sonny Liston Was a Friend of Mine
The Roadrunner
A Run Through the Jungle
40, Still at Home
Tarantula
Mouses
Daddy’s Girl
New Stories Night Train
Volcanoes from Hell
A Merry Little Christmas
All Along the Watchtower
Diary of My Health
The Junkman of Chengdu
Bomb Shelter Noel
Acknowledgments
Credits
About the Author
Also by Thom Jones
Newsletters
For my grandmother, Mag
Introduction
The Truth of Thom Jones
The two enemies of human happiness are pain and boredom.
Just remember, once you’re over the hill you begin to pick up speed.
—from Thom’s favorite guy: Schopenhauer
THOM JONES’S LIES—his sentences and stories—were more persuasive, more important, and more deeply felt than most men’s truths. “I would work hard to free the truth that’s within me and make it art,” he said in one interview. No lie there.
Thom and I met the night before the 1993 National Book Awards, when all the finalists got to read for five minutes (firm time limit, firm looks) from their nominated books. Thom and I were newly published writers—as we both said, “Yeah, new, not young”—and we clung to each other that night like sibling wallflowers: smart-ass, awkward, and wise enough to be surprised. When people were kind to us (tap or sparkling?), we looked at them like dogs brought home from the pound might, and when Annie Proulx swept by us the next night to claim the National Book Award (“Thank you, I deserved it,” she said), we just pulled our coats and our clunky shoes in a bit more, so as not to get in her way.
But the night before, Thom slayed. He read the first five minutes of “I Want to Live!” from The Pugilist at Rest, a story that would later be selected by John Updike for his Best American Short Stories of the Century anthology. It’s a monologue by an older woman, dying of cancer. She loves her painkillers and cartoons, and there is true love between her and her concerned, hapless son-in-law, checking in on her. I actually saw people in the audience laugh and then cry and then shake their heads at their roller-coaster feelings and at the drama of human beings and our ridiculous, indomitable will to live. Whenever I reread that story, to remind myself how to build character, how to wield voice, I see Thom reading and I see the damp faces before him.
My own other, most personal favorite is “Cold Snap,” the title story of Thom’s second collection. Before I was a writer, I’d had some other jobs, not as a janitor or a copywriter, like Thom had, but mostly as a bartender and social worker. My sympathy for the burned-out helper cannot be exaggerated. Richard, our hero in “Cold Snap,” is a hot mess, as is often the case for the Jones protagonist. Thom avoided the “worried well” and the complacent as suitable subjects almost as assiduously as he avoided the lucky and the measured optimist. Richard has a quintessentially Jonesian terrible outlook. “I can fuck up a wet dream with my attitude,” the man says and no reader would argue. He has gotten himself sent home from Africa, with malaria and minus his medical license, because he’s one inch shy of being a junkie and people have noticed. (In Jones’s fiction, not only are characters free to make bad choices, but they also suffer the consequences. There’s no room for bravado and not much for freewheeling self-deception.) Richard, being a mess, has cut his thumb and it’s giving him no end of trouble, and he has to—he has to—get some pain pills, as so many of Jones’s characters do. His sister, Susan, is a schizophrenic, which is not as central to this story as the self-inflicted lobotomy she endured when she tried to kill herself.
Richard shows off for us by playing Russian roulette. He claims that not dying has made him euphoric, like Van Gogh, minus the slicing of the ear. He doesn’t die. But he doesn’t fool Thom Jones, and therefore he doesn’t fool us. The man is wild with grief and the only help on the horizon, the unlikely and lovely and damaged cavalry to the rescue, is his sister. Susan tells Richard that she dreams of a happy life for them, driving a ’67 Dodge around heaven, and after the telling of the dream, in their real life together, they have an elaborate lunch (“the best little lunch of a lifetime”) in Richard’s car. They listen to “This Is Dedicated to the One I Love” on the radio. “What can be better,” Richard says, “than a cool, breezy, fragrant day, rain-splatter diamonds on the wraparound windshield of a Ninety-eight Olds with a view of cherry trees blooming in the light spring rain?” I love this story more than I can say. It is peace and trouble, love and grief, doom and the tiny flicker of hope, if one can bear to have it.
There are plenty of critics who have raved about Thom’s Vietnam stories, exceptional feats of imagination from a man who, while a Marine himself, wasn’t actually there, having been prevented from deploying after suffering temporal-lobe epilepsy when he was soundly beaten in a boxing match. (Boxing, like that war, is a preoccupation throughout his fiction.) Each time his collections came out, the reviews were pyrotechnic: for Thom’s irresistible voice, his bravery, his audacity and grit, and his knack for unnerving cheer in the face of catastrophe. In short, for his “amazing blend of knowledge, skill, terror, and release,” according to Robert Stone, who seems to me to have been a fair judge of these things.
Thom’s sentences have crack and clarity. His paragraphs build to stories and places that you hadn’t thought to go, with people you hadn’t known you could recognize, and even love. “Give Baker a compass and a topographical map,” says the soldier narrator of “Pot
Shack,” “and one could bear witness to—indeed, become a part of—the elusive, semimystical Tao of military science. Such were Baker’s leadership skills that his every thought, word, and action could propel a lesser personality into selfless, right actions in the service of the Big Green Machine.”
You will see all this, Thom Jones’s whole wide, deep, rambunctious, grief-stricken, and melancholy range of gifts, in the twenty-six stories gathered in these pages. Thom Jones is, as a character describes his man Schopenhauer, an “august seeker of truth.” He was a friend to the friendless, a strong voice for the maimed, funny as hell, and from the first to the last, a great American writer.
—Amy Bloom
Selected Stories
The Pugilist at Rest
HEY BABY GOT caught writing a letter to his girl when he was supposed to be taking notes on the specs of the M-14 rifle. We were sitting in a stifling hot Quonset hut during the first weeks of boot camp, August 1966, at the Marine Corps Recruit Depot in San Diego. Sergeant Wright snatched the letter out of Hey Baby’s hand, and later that night in the squad bay he read the letter to the Marine recruits of Platoon 263, his voice laden with sarcasm. “Hey, Baby!” he began, and then as he went into the body of the letter he worked himself into a state of outrage and disgust. It was a letter to Rosie Rottencrotch, he said at the end, and what really mattered, what was really at issue and what was of utter importance was not Rosie Rottencrotch and her steaming-hot panties but rather the muzzle velocity of the M-14 rifle.
Hey Baby paid for the letter by doing a hundred squat thrusts on the concrete floor of the squad bay, but the main prize he won that night was that he became forever known as Hey Baby to the recruits of Platoon 263—in addition to being a shitbird, a faggot, a turd, a maggot, and other such standard appellations. To top it all off, shortly after the incident, Hey Baby got a Dear John from his girl back in Chicago, of whom Sergeant Wright, myself, and seventy-eight other Marine recruits had come to know just a little.
Hey Baby was not in the Marine Corps for very long. The reason for this was that he started in on my buddy, Jorgeson. Jorgeson was my main man, and Hey Baby started calling him Jorgepussy and began harassing him and pushing him around. He was down on Jorgeson because whenever we were taught some sort of combat maneuver or tactic, Jorgeson would say, under his breath, “You could get killed if you try that.” Or, “Your ass is had, if you do that.” You got the feeling that Jorgeson didn’t think loving the American flag and defending democratic ideals in Southeast Asia were all that important. He told me that what he really wanted to do was have an artist’s loft in the SoHo district of New York City, wear a beret, eat liver-sausage sandwiches made with stale baguettes, drink Tokay wine, smoke dope, paint pictures, and listen to the wailing, sorrowful songs of that French singer Edith Piaf, otherwise known as “The Little Sparrow.”
After the first half hour of boot camp most of the other recruits wanted to get out, too, but they nourished dreams of surfboards, Corvettes, and blond babes. Jorgeson wanted to be a beatnik and hang out with Jack Kerouac and Neal Cassady, slam down burning shots of amber whiskey, and hear Charles Mingus play real cool jazz on the bass fiddle. He wanted to practice Zen Buddhism, throw the I Ching, eat couscous, and study astrology charts. All of this was foreign territory to me. I had grown up in Aurora, Illinois, and had never heard of such things. Jorgeson had a sharp tongue and was so supercilious in his remarks that I didn’t know quite how seriously I should take this talk, but I enjoyed his humor and I did believe he had the sensibilities of an artist. It was not some vague yearning. I believed very much that he could become a painter of pictures. At that point he wasn’t putting his heart and soul into becoming a Marine. He wasn’t a true believer like me.
Some weeks after Hey Baby began hassling Jorgeson, Sergeant Wright gave us his best speech: “You men are going off to war, and it’s not a pretty thing,” etc. & etc., “and if Luke the Gook knocks down one of your buddies, a fellow Marine, you are going to risk your life and go in and get that Marine and you are going to bring him out. Not because I said so. No! You are going after that Marine because you are a Marine, a member of the most elite fighting force in the world, and that man out there who’s gone down is a Marine, and he’s your buddy. He is your brother! Once you are a Marine, you are always a Marine and you will never let another Marine down.” Etc. & etc. “You can take a Marine out of the Corps but you can’t take the Corps out of a Marine.” Etc. & etc. At the time it seemed to me a very good speech, and it stirred me deeply. Sergeant Wright was no candy ass. He was one squared-away dude, and he could call cadence. Man, it puts a lump in my throat when I remember how that man could sing cadence. Apart from Jorgeson, I think all of the recruits in Platoon 263 were proud of Sergeant Wright. He was the real thing, the genuine article. He was a crackerjack Marine.
In the course of training, lots of the recruits dropped out of the original platoon. Some couldn’t pass the physical fitness tests and had to go to a special camp for pussies. This was a particularly shameful shortcoming, the most humiliating apart from bed-wetting. Other recruits would get pneumonia, strep throat, infected foot blisters, or whatever, and lose time that way. Some didn’t qualify at the rifle range. One would break a leg. Another would have a nervous breakdown (and this was also deplorable). People dropped out right and left. When the recruit corrected whatever deficiency he had, or when he got better, he would be picked up by another platoon that was in the stage of basic training that he had been in when his training was interrupted. Platoon 263 picked up dozens of recruits in this fashion. If everything went well, however, you got through with the whole business in twelve weeks. That’s not a long time, but it seemed like a long time. You did not see a female in all that time. You did not see a newspaper or a television set. You did not eat a candy bar. Another thing was the fact that you had someone on top of you, watching every move you made. When it was time to “shit, shower, and shave,” you were given just ten minutes, and had to confront lines and so on to complete the entire affair. Head calls were so infrequent that I spent a lot of time that might otherwise have been neutral or painless in the eye-watering anxiety that I was going to piss my pants. We ran to chow, where we were faced with enormous steam vents that spewed out a sickening smell of rancid, superheated grease. Still, we entered the mess hall with ravenous appetites, ate a huge tray of food in just a few minutes, and then ran back to our company area in formation, choking back the burning bile of a meal too big to be eaten so fast. God forbid that you would lose control and vomit.
If all had gone well in the preceding hours, Sergeant Wright would permit us to smoke one cigarette after each meal. Jorgeson had shown me the wisdom of switching from Camels to Pall Malls—they were much longer, packed a pretty good jolt, and when we snapped open our brushed-chrome Zippos, torched up, and inhaled the first few drags, we shared the overmastering pleasure that tobacco can bring if you use it seldom and judiciously. These were always the best moments of the day—brief respites from the tyrannical repression of recruit training. As we got close to the end of it all Jorgeson liked to play a little game. He used to say to me (with fragrant blue smoke curling out of his nostrils), “If someone said, ‘I’ll give you ten thousand dollars to do all of this again,’ what would you say?” “No way, Jack!” He would keep on upping it until he had John Beresford Tipton, the guy from The Millionaire, offering me a check for a million bucks. “Not for any money,” I’d say.
While they were all smoldering under various pressures, the recruits were also getting pretty “salty”—they were beginning to believe. They were beginning to think of themselves as Marines. If you could make it through this, the reasoning went, you wouldn’t crack in combat. So I remember that I had tears in my eyes when Sergeant Wright gave us the spiel about how a Marine would charge a machine-gun nest to save his buddies, dive on a hand grenade, do whatever it takes—and yet I was ashamed when Jorgeson caught me wiping them away. All of the recruits were teary except Jorgeson. He
had these very clear cobalt-blue eyes. They were so remarkable that they caused you to notice Jorgeson in a crowd. There was unusual beauty in those eyes, and there was an extraordinary power in them. Apart from having a pleasant enough face, Jorgeson was small and unassuming except for those eyes. Anyhow, when he caught me getting sentimental he gave me this look that penetrated to the core of my being. It was the icy look of absolute contempt, and it caused me to doubt myself. I said, “Man! Can’t you get into it? For Christ’s sake!”
“I’m not like you,” he said. “But I am into it, more than you could ever know. I never told you this before, but I am Kal-El, born on the planet Krypton and rocketed to Earth as an infant, moments before my world exploded. Disguised as a mild-mannered Marine, I have resolved to use my powers for the good of mankind. Whenever danger appears on the scene, truth and justice will be served as I slip into the green U.S.M.C. utility uniform and become Earth’s greatest hero.”
I got highly pissed and didn’t talk to him for a couple of days after this. Then, about two weeks before boot camp was over, when we were running out to the parade field for drill with our rifles at port arms, all assholes and elbows, I saw Hey Baby give Jorgeson a nasty shove with his M-14. Hey Baby was a large and fairly tough young man who liked to displace his aggressive impulses on Jorgeson, but he wasn’t as big or as tough as I.
Jorgeson nearly fell down as the other recruits scrambled out to the parade field, and Hey Baby gave a short, malicious laugh. I ran past Jorgeson and caught up to Hey Baby; he picked me up in his peripheral vision, but by then it was too late. I set my body so that I could put everything into it, and with one deft stroke I hammered him in the temple with the sharp edge of the steel butt plate of my M-14. It was not exactly a premeditated crime, although I had been laying to get him. My idea before this had simply been to lay my hands on him, but now I had blood in my eye. I was a skilled boxer, and I knew the temple was a vulnerable spot; the human skull is otherwise hard and durable, except at its base. There was a sickening crunch, and Hey Baby dropped into the ice plants along the side of the company street.